Photographers Kit – What You Should Carry

Your Photography Kit

What you carry in your kit will depend on the type of photography you like to do. If you’re going on safari or you’re the main photographer at a wedding then your going to need to carry some kit that most of us won’t need, but there are basic things that we all should carry in our kit to make life easier and to make sure we don’t miss a photographic opportunity.

Have a look at our post we did the other day about camera bags, you will need one to carry your equipment.

Pack a Spare!

Have you ever been out with your camera and found something really worthwhile photographing, only to find that your battery indicator starts blinking red and you forgot to pack a spare one!, well, me too. Ok, so it might not have happened to me recently because over the years, I’ve learned my lesson, but I still get caught out now and then. So now I make sure I carry all that I think I’ll need in my kit.

Battery

As I’ve already mentioned, carrying a spare battery is important, particularly if you’re using your flash often, or shooting in really cold conditions when the battery’s charge doesn’t last as long as it normally would. It’s worth buying a manufacturers own genuine battery as a spare, Be careful when buying cheap replacement batteries off the Internet, at best they may have less capacity than advertised and at worst could represent a fire hazard.

Memory Cards

The capacity of the memory card you buy (and how many) will depend on the type of photography you do.If you only shoot with the small  jpeg setting, then your memory card will hold far more images than if you were shooting in raw mode, for example: a 1gb memory card may hold 286 medium jpeg images but only 67 raw images and if you’re shooting in the video mode then you may only get about 10m 40secs of play time. I don’t like to put all my eggs in one basket when it comes to memory cards, in other words I don’t buy the very high capacity ones just in case they fail, I use several smaller capacity ones. So, if you’re shooting in raw, or using video mode often and, depending on the size of your memory card, you will need to carry a spare.

Filters

You may have a filter already attached to your lens to protect it such as a UV filter or a skylight filter, but if you enjoy shooting landscapes that includes water, such as ponds, lakes and rivers, then you might include a polarizing filter to help improve colour saturation and eliminate reflections on water or glass. Other popular filters with photographers are neutral density filter (ND) and the graduated neutral density filter (GND). The ND filter is used when you want to limit the light reaching the sensor without reducing the aperture (such as on a bright, sunny day); good for effects, such as blurring water in a waterfall. The GND filter is generally used for landscape shots; when, for example,  you want to darken an otherwise bright sky.

What’s in my Bag?

Here’s are a few other things that I carry in my kit:

• Lenses
• Tripod
• Hama lens cleaning pen/brush
• Micro fibre cloth and lens tissues
• Lens/filter cleaning fluid
• Remote cable release
• Small torch
• External flash
• Compass
• Penknife
• Sunglasses
• Bottle of water
• Mobile (cell) phone

Maybe you can add other items to the list of what you carry, or perhaps you prefer the simplicity of  just your camera and a good ‘walk-about’ lens without the burden of carrying all that ‘stuff’. But whatever you carry in your kit, it’s worth planning for any eventuality.

Featured image by Geishaboy500

source http://photographicblog.com/photographers-kit-what-you-should-carry/